Category: Uncategorized

Testing the infrastructure

If you have not yet read about Desired State Configuration, now would be the time. Head to docs.microsoft.com and understand the concepts before reading further.

The configurations we compiled in the previous blog post require two community resources, AuditPolicyDsc and SecurityPolicyDsc. Registry settings are built-in. Both resources contain the necessary code that your clients need to test the configuration. If you don’t trust external code or are not able to get code in your environment, why not create a test environment instead?

Desired State Configuration is a powerful tool in any Windows environment when it comes to automation. In customer projects, I personally like to do a greenfield approach whenever possible.

However, there are certainly situations where taking something that already exists might be beneficial. This was the case at one customer, who wanted to convert Group Policies to DSC configurations in order to test them. Suffice to say, my interest was piqued.